Emirati crime cinema gets a new streaming entry this week. Psycho, a home-grown action thriller set in the 1980s, premieres exclusively on STARZPLAY on 29 October, and it is one of the few local productions to put Emirati talent in charge of the writing, the producing and the directing.
The plot is a chase. Faisal and his friend Mohammed commit thefts and a murder, and crime gradually takes over their lives. When police start to piece together what they’ve done, the two leave their village for a distant city and then split up. Faisal goes back to preying on travellers, and that is how he runs into Nasser. Nasser finds evidence tying Faisal to a killing and tries to go to the police, but suspicion turns on him instead and he has to run too. It’s a familiar setup, the innocent man forced to act like a fugitive. How well it works will come down to how tightly the film handles its reversals.
The story behind the camera may be the more interesting one. Amer Salmeen Al Murry wrote and produced the film and was also its director of photography. His son, Sultan Al Murry, directs, and this is his first feature. He learned the craft working alongside his father, so the film is a direct handover from one generation of UAE filmmakers to the next. That matters in an industry still building its own talent pipeline.
The production was small. Psycho was shot entirely in Al Ain over 17 days with a crew of 42, with support from the Creative Media Authority and the Abu Dhabi Film Commission. Instead of studio sets, the film relies on the city’s desert roads and open landscapes, and the elder Al Murry uses lighting and camera movement to recreate the period and build tension. Two young filmmakers also got hands-on training across several departments during the shoot. It’s a detail that rarely makes the trailer, but it’s how a local industry grows its crews.
The cast is Omar Al Mulla, Asim Alawad, Mersal Alshamsi and Abdulla Al Jafali, with Faris Al Balushi and Sandra Hodges.
The streaming-first release makes sense. Regional platforms increasingly need locally made content to stand apart from the global catalogues they compete with, and small Emirati features often struggle to hold cinema screens against Hollywood releases. A STARZPLAY premiere puts Psycho in front of viewers across the region without a short theatrical run that could bury it.
